A meeting with a mermaid determined both Mikitka’s life—and his death: in people’s memory, he stayed as a sorcerer, a man who brought evil to the earth, a student of Yakov Bruce, the famous alchemist from the time of Peter the First. Mikitka’s house burned down, the lake where he stood shrank into pieces—but the legend of the mermaid and the Black Book she keeps survived…
Olga, who spent the summer at her dacha, didn’t believe in legends and didn’t recognize mermaids—she’d never even heard of the Black Book. But when the first murder happened on the lake shore, and then the second, she had to wonder: what if mermaids really do exist, just like Yakov Bruce’s Black Book…